Neighborhood Stories

Just as the big, bass seven-o’clock whistle trailed out from the round-house – the brick-yard one didn’t blow because the men was all at the market square – the thing happened that we’d arranged for. Down Daphne Street, hurrying some because they was late, with irregular marching and a good deal of laughing, come the public-school teachers with the school children. We’d give out that they’d be easier managed so, and not so much under foot; but what we really wanted was that they should come in just like this, together, and set together, because we wanted something of them after a while.

They sat down on the place we’d left for ’em, on the seats and the grass in front of everybody, and them that could sing we put on the platform, lots of rows deep, so’s they all covered it. They was big boys and little, and little girls and big, good-dressed and poor-dressed; with honest fathers, and with them that didn’t know honest when they see it nor miss it when they didn’t – and all of them was the Friendship Village that’s going to be some time, when the market square is emptied of us others, for good and all.

“Where’s Threat and ’Lish?” I says to Eppleby, that was helping keep the children in order.

“Dustin’ the mayor’s office out ready, I s’pose,” he says, wrinkling his eyes at the corners.

“Mebbe they’ve abducted each other,” Mis’ Toplady suggests, soothing.

Mis’ Sykes looked over from filling the syrup pitchers – she’d boiled the brown sugar down for that, and it added its thick, golden smell unto the general inviting mixture.

“I don’t think,” she says serious, “that you’d ought to speak disrespectful of anybody that’s going to be your mayor. Public officials,” said she, “had ought to be paid respect to, or else the law won’t be carried out.”

“Shucks,” says Mis’ Toplady, short. She’d made upwards of ninety griddle cakes by then, and she was getting kind of flustered and crispy.

“Shucks?” says Mis’ Sykes, haughty and questioning, and all but in two syllables.

“If that’s all the law is,” says Mis’ Toplady, beating away at her pancake batter, “give me anar-kicky, or whatever it is they call it.”

Mis’ Sykes never said a word. She just went on making syrup, reproachful. Mis’ Sykes is one of them that acts like life was made up of the pattern of things, and like speaking of warf and woof wasn’t delicate. And she never so much as lets on they is such a thing as a knot. Yes, some folks is like that. But not me – not me.

It was ’most half-past seven o’clock when the bird-man was ready. Like a big bug the machine looked, with spidery, bent legs and wings spread ready and no head necessary. And when he finally run it off down the square and headed towards the Pump pasture, my heart sunk some. My land, I thought, it can’t be a real true one. I guess there are them, but this right here on the market square can’t be one.

Since the world begun, there ain’t a more wonderful minute for folks than the minute when they first see some kind of flying-machine leave the ground —leave the ground! It’s like seeing the future come true right in your face. The thing done it so gentle and so simple that you’d of thought it was invented when legs was. It lifted itself up in the air, like by its own boot-straps, and it went up and up and up, just like going up was its own alphabet. It went and it kept going, its motor buzzing and purring, softer and softer. And pretty soon the blue that it was going up to meet seemed to come down and meet it, and the two sort of joined, and the big, wide gold morning flowed all over them, and the first thing I knew the bird-man’s machine and him in it looked like just what I had said: an eagle of the Lord, soaring to meet the sun like a friend of its.

I couldn’t bear it any more. It seemed to me as if, if I should look any longer, I should all of a sudden have ten senses instead of five, and they’d explode me. I looked away and down. And when I done that, all at once there I was looking right into the face of all the folks in Friendship Village. Heads back, a sea of little white dabs that was faces, and hearts beating underneath where you couldn’t see ’em – all of us was standing there breathless, feeling just alike. Feeling just alike and being just alike, underneath that wonderful thing happening in the sky… And all of a sudden, while I looked at them, the faces all blurred and wiggled, and it seemed like I was looking into only one face, the face of Friendship Village, like a person…

I see it, like I’d never seen it before. While we watched, we was one person. When we was all thinking about the same thing, there was only one of us. And the more wonderful things that come into the world and took hold of everybody, the more one we was going to get and to stay. And this, all vague inside of us, I knew now was what us ladies had meant by what we’d planned. Didn’t it seem – didn’t it seem as if them that watched had ought to stay one– that decent, wondering, almost reverent one, long enough to vote decent and wondering and reverent for their town?

Right while my heart was beating with it all, the little buzzing and purring of the motor, away up there in the blue, stopped short off. My eyes flew up again, and I see the bird-man coming down. He was up so high that he was a dot, and he grew and grew like a thing being born in the sky – right down towards us and on us he come like a shot, a shot-down shot. Nobody breathed. I couldn’t see. But I looked and looked and dreaded… And not eight hundred feet from the ground he begun coming down easy, and he come the rest of the way as gentle as a bird, and lit where he rose from.

Oh, how they cheered him – like one man! Like one man. Lem Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and the boys that was out in the field went and shook his hand – like the servants, I thought in the middle of my head, of some great new order. And I was thinking so deep and so breathless that I ’most forgot the band till it crashed right out behind us, playing loud and fine that Marseilles French piece, like we’d told them. And when it done that, up hopped the children that it give the cue to, and there in the midst of us they struck in, singing loud and clear the words they sung in school to that old tune, with its wonderful tang to it, that slips to your heels with its music and makes you want to go start something and to start it then:

“Come, Children of To-morrow, come!
New glory dawns upon the world.
The ancient banners must be furled.
The earth becomes our common home —
The earth becomes our common home.
From plain and field and town there sound
The stirring rumors of the day.
Old wrongs and burdens must make way
For men to tread the common ground.

“Look up! The children win to their immortal place.
March on, march on – within the ranks of all the human race.

“Come, love of people, for the part
Invest our willing arms with might.
Mother of Liberty, shed light
As on the land, so in the heart —
As on the land, so in the heart.
Divided, we have long withstood
The love that is our common speech.
The comrade cry of each to each
Is calling us to humanhood.”

Hum it to the tune of that Marseilles piece, and you’ll know how we was all feeling. By the time they got down to their last two lines, my throat was about the size of my head.

And then the bird-man got back in his little sulky seat, and he waved his hand to us, and he left his machine run down the field, and lift, and head straight for open country. His way lay, it seemed, right acrost Friendship Village; and he’d no more’n started before the band started too, playing the tune that by now was in everybody’s veins. And behind them the children fell in, singing again, and with the people streaming behind them they all marched off down Daphne Street – where the little shops lay waiting to be opened, and the polls was waiting to be voted in, and Friendship Village was waiting for us to know it was a town, like it meant.

All us ladies went to scraping up plates like fury. Excep’ Mis’ Toplady. She stood for a minute wiping her eyes on a paper napkin. And she says:

“Oh, ladies. I ain’t never felt so much like a human being since I was born one.”

And me, I stood there looking across the Market Square to the school-house. There it was, with its doors open and the new voting machine setting in the hall, – they’d took the polls out of the barber shop and the livery stable sole because the voting machine got in the way of trade. They’d put it in the school-house. And it was to the school-house that the men were going now.

“Oh,” I says to Mis’ Toplady, “would you think anybody could go in a child’s school-house, and vote for anybody that – ”

“No, no,” she says, “you wouldn’t think so, would you?”

But she didn’t look at me. She was looking over to the school-house steps. Lem Toplady stood there, and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and Hugh Merriman and Mis’ Uppers’s boy – watching the last of the bird-man and the air-wagon flying down the sky. When it had gone, the four boys turned and went together up the steps of the school-house. And Mis’ Toplady and Mis’ Sturgis and Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman and Mis’ Uppers stood and watched them – going in to vote now, to the place where the four mothers had seen them go ever since they were little bits of boys, with faces and clothes to be kept clean, and lessons to learn, and lunch baskets to fill. Then the mothers could either do these things for them – or anyway help along. Now they stood there doing nothing, watching, while their boys went in to do their first vote – into the school-house where they’d learned their A B C’s.

“Ain’t that – ain’t it just – ?” I says low to Mis’ Toplady; and kind of stopped.

“Ain’t it?” she says, fervent and low too. “Oh, ain’t it?”

“The time’ll come,” I says, “when you mothers, and me too, will go in there with them. And when we’ll go straight from a great public meeting – like this – to a great public business like that. And when it comes – ”

We all looked at one another – all but Mis’ Silas Sykes, that was busy with the syrup pitchers. But the thing was over the rest of us – the lift and the courage and the belief of that hour we’d all had together. And I says out:

“Oh, ladies! I believe in us. I believe in us.”

So I tell you, I wasn’t surprised at what that day done. I dunno for sure what done it. Mebbe it was just the common sense in folks that I cannot get over believing in. Mebbe it was the cores of their minds that I know is sound, no matter how many soft spots disfigures their brains. Mebbe it was the big power and the big glory that’s near us, waiting to be drawn-on-and-used as fast as we learn how to do it – no, I dunno for sure. But they put Eppleby Holcomb in for mayor. Eppleby got in, to mayor the town! And some said it was because the boys that was to cast their first vote had got out, last minute, and done some hustling, unbeknownst. And some thought it was because Threat and ’Lish couldn’t wait, but done a little private celebrating together in Threat’s hotel bar the night before election. And others said election always is some ticklish – they give that reason.

But me – I went and stood out on my side porch that election-day night, a-looking down Daphne Street to the village. There it lay, with its arc light shining blue by the Market Square, and it was being a village, with nobody looking and all its folks in its houses, just like the family around that one evening lamp. And their hearts was beating along about the same things; just like they had beat that day for the sky-wagon, and for the Marseilles French piece. Only they didn’t know it – yet.

And I says right out loud to the village – just like Friendship Village was a person, with its face turned toward me, listening:

“Why, you ain’t half of us – nor you ain’t some of us. You’re all of us! And you must of known it all the time.”

THE FLOOD

It’s “brother” now and it’s “brother” then,
And it’s “brother” another day,
And it’s “brother” whenever a loud doom sounds
With a terrible toll to pay…
But what of the silent dooms they bear
In an inoffensive way?